Anyone remember PowerVR Kyro II based cards ? Well, Imagination Technologies is planning to make a return to the discrete graphics card market in the second half of this year. Last year the company acquired ray-tracing firm Caustic Graphics, and the plan is to use this technology in a GPGPU workstation card that promises to deliver real-time ray-tracing.

Last year, Imagination Technologies acquired Caustic Graphics, a small start-up company out of San Francisco which was working hard on creating an accelerator that would make real-time ray-tracing a reality. The company managed to create two generations of products which were more technology demonstrators than anything else, but their FPGA chips worked.

Following the acquisition, Caustic continued working hard on building commercial purpose for its technology and on CES 2012, we managed to see the birth of commercialization. By using OpenRL Brazil 3.0 software dev kits (SDK), Imagination Technologies are in the final stages of bringing a real-time ray-tracing accelerator card to market.